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WASHINGTON — The NAFTA countries aren’t breaking up. But they are publicly bickering. They are delaying their next get-together date. And they appear to have agreed they won’t be resolving their differences by the end of this year.
The tensions at the negotiating table have exploded into public view.

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump has threatened to blow up NAFTA less than one week into the renegotiation of the trade agreement, providing an early indication that the upcoming talks might occur under a cloud of menace.
The president’s threat itself is no surprise. A common topic of hallway chatter at last week’s first round of talks last week was just when he might deploy that withdrawal threat, which many view as his principal source of negotiating leverage.
The only surprise is how quickly it came.

BEIJING – Justin Trudeau left China’s capital without a deal to launch free trade negotiations with the world’s second largest economy.
But after ‎the Prime Minister’s meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping, an agreement appears close. Sources suggested the deal was on and then off again at various points in the evening.
As the Canadian delegation set off for the Fortune Global Forum in Guangzhou, the two sides appear to be on the verge of an agreement, having failed to sign a deal the day before.

This post An Old Friend Might Die This Weekend appeared first on Daily Reckoning.
Huzzah and hooray. It’s Labor Day weekend. When Americans will flock to the beach… to the lake… to the mountains. When the kids enjoy their last days of freedom…
And when the dollar dies?
The world’s 20 leading economic powers will powwow this Labor Day weekend in the lovely lakeside city of Hangzhou, China.

Over the past few years, I and several other US trade-watchers have lamented the United States' dwindling leadership on global trade and economic issues and warned of that trend's troubling potential ramifications. It appears that at least one of our breathless predictions may finally be coming true.

First, the dollar dropped following comments from commerce secretary Wilbur Ross, who said that he expected to start renegotiating NAFTA within two weeks and that Japan will be high on the list for trade agreements.

BRUSSELS: The European Union and the United States launched negotiations in July 2013 to create a free trade agreement, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), with initial hopes of a rapid conclusion. However, there is little clear sign of progress two years on. Here are the main stumbling blocks. AMBITION AND SCALE The EU-US free trade agreement would be bigger than any trade deal enacted so far, encompassing a third of world trade and nearly half of global GDP.

Individual Global Investor submits:Trade figures for the month of November were released by many of the industrialized nations this week. While the globally picture is one of a gradual recovery, German trade appears to be coming back more quickly than others. Some themes are common ones. Germany, along with Japan and Mexico are seeing growing trade surpluses on shipments of manufactured goods to the U.S. The U.S. trade deficit is growing. Other themes are not so common.